There are two kinds of people: those of us that are domesticated and those that feel strangely out of place. The ones that feel out of place, might not be able to communicate why, but know in their gut not only that our world is toxic but that the systems and traditions we’ve created don’t feel even close to natural. No matter which camp you fall in, both feel depressed, frustrated, anxious and flat-out unsatisfied as they get dragged through our culture’s unfriendly demands just to stay afloat. Have you ever asked yourself how and why we’ve sabotaged ourselves like this?

I know this will sound dramatic and easy to dismiss but there really is a Matrix. That’s why that movie struck a chord. We have inherited and continue to invest in an unfair, complicated world of lies we don’t even like. That’s completely against our human nature. There’s a really good reason all our fantasies are undomesticated and filled with apocalyptic visions of wiping the slate clean, or hedonistic freedom.

A huge key to understanding this, is to press pause and look objectively backwards, beyond the short 5,000 years of written history and into the totality of human life 195,000 years before it. To do that you’ll have to look with different eyes and stop using the pejorative, biased, puritanical lens that we were the Flintstones or ugly, violent, selfish, filthy, hairy ape-people. That’s a dangerous and inaccurate story we tell that helps make our lives feel vastly progressive but, in fact, continues to feed the Matrix beast.

This week’s guest, author and Psychologist Chris Ryan, has tackled big parts of the Matrix through his and his wife’s book, Sex at Dawn, his podcast Tangentially Speaking and his forthcoming book Civilized to Death.